Fast Society Says "No Magic" In Group Messaging Alone

To hear some people tell it, the hot new thing in 2011 is the battle for the hearts and minds of group texters everywhere. With the successful sale of Beluga to Facebook, news of Yobongo scoring more than a million in angel funding, and larger rounds by others including GroupMe and TextPlus, you can forgive people for skipping over the lean Fast Society, who has so far stayed away from VCs, gathering just over $200k in funding, and only counts four employees. But despite their being small, they talk a big game. I took a call with company cofounder Matthew Rosenberg earlier this week, and he, without so much as a filter, told me why he feels the industry is fragmented, how every other challenger is going at the problem wrong, and how greedy carriers (such as Sprint) are harming the entire industry.

Fast Society, from much of the coverage I've seen in other tech blogs, has often been characterized as being aimed at socialites, as much about the flashy lights and party-goers as the code - celebrating a good night out more than good syntax. Rosenberg certainly didn't disagree, not shying away from the label, explaining that the service at its foundation was aimed to "help people, when they are going out with their friends, to experience great things around fun events." For him, much of a shared event is not just the actual activity, but the buildup to the event, and the shared emotions associated with the location and experience.

"Everybody else is going for the dirty engineer feel," he said. "We are going for what everybody else wants. Fun and parties and nightlife. That's what normal people do. People don't sit around their computer blogging all night. We have tried to be focused on people who aren't necessarily early adopters who don't care about engineering."

Shrugging off the comment about nocturnal blogging being abnormal, which I obviously disagree with, I asked him how he thought so many different players could participate - and whether users were tired of seeing their social structures split, much like the early days of IM, where AOL users couldn't speak to those on ICQ, MSN or Yahoo!. Unsurprisingly, he had a response all queued up.

"At the end of the day, there's going to be a reckoning," he said. "The fact these things can't communicate hurts the industry. It's so fragmented. Nobody is going to own the communication layer. It's too crowded."

With the crowding comes a seemingly unending stream of news from one company or another. On the heels of SXSW, where many services, including Fast Society, stepped up their game in a war for visibility, Rosenberg said that particular aspect of the service was not groundbreaking. In fact, he practically dismissed it, calling it a "utility", adding there's "no magic behind it". Fast Society instead wants to offer not just group texting, but location sharing, instant conference calls, pictures and video - and unlike practically every other vendor, Fast Society does not use third party vendor Twilio as its back-end, saving the company significant charges on SMS, he explained.

In the group messaging space, TextPlus is both the pioneer and the alpha dog in the hunt, with practically every other service having sprung up in the last twelve months, some to more success than others. Fast Society was launched in September of 2009, focused on building the platform that would enable them to scale without drowning in a sea of red ink, Rosenberg said. "We're the only ones that I know of who don't pay per message," he explained. "We have a flat fee. What our competitors pay in half a day, we pay for a year's worth of messaging costs. It's a big competitive advantage for us".

In a build first make revenue second world, Fast Society seems odd in that they've actually executed real business, striking deals with MTV, and other small sponsorships - which Rosenberg attributed to delivering a compelling experience and providing value for a clearly-targeted audience of teens and 20-somethings out to have a good time. He railed against the industry's tradition of giving value away for free, and being drawn to in-stream advertising like a moth to flame. "It is not pleasant, and not something people want," he said.

The company's image of fast fashion party boys drinking and dancing the night away, augmented by the bright purple and sharp angles of the company's logo and product, may make it seem aloof or too focused on hipsters to be a real business. But Rosenberg almost claimed the opposite, saying "we have the most soul in this space," and railing against the relative dinosaur carriers, like Sprint, who is trying to charge for anybody sending SMS messages to their system, upward of a half cent more per message. "It's disturbing and harms the whole industry," he said. "It's just a nasty thing to do."

If there is a reckoning in the industry, with one or two names ending up winners, others pivoting and fading, Fast Society is going to make pushing to the finish line interesting. Maybe they're the black hat in the fight, or the white knight trying to save end users from a sea of boring apps. Rosenberg may have thought he caught me on a tired afternoon stuck in an airport terminal on the way to an event (which I was), but he still managed to make a good case for why Fast Society is in the game, and why their lean approach targeting real revenue could keep them ahead of others. You can find Fast Society on iOS or Android, and at FastSociety.com. The sign on the door says they're "Built to Party," so go have fun.

Joint App Brings Instant Messaging, Group Chat to Twitter

Twitter's direct messaging system is an easy way for two people to engage in back and forth discussion through the site, but the serve and volley type of chat is a far cry from real-time, and doesn't allow for broader group chat. Today, Joint, brought to you from the team behind LazyFeed and LazyScope, is launching to bring the flow of instant messaging and semi-persistent chat topics to your existing Twitter social graph. You can get your exclusive invite by posting a comment or by following @imjoint on Twitter.

With group chat applications on mobile being all the rage, the desktop experience has been somewhat forgotten, but a dedicated app presents the best keyboard and CPU cycles to avoid any latency between updates, argues founder Ethan Gahng. And once you've tried Joint with a friend or two, you can see how fast you can go from the ping pong manner of DMs in Twitter to real, instant, conversation.

I Can Invite You to Joint Via a Personal URL

You first get connected with Joint through getting invited by a friend through a dedicated, personal, URL. (Such as this one) You are then asked to download a small Adobe AIR client that runs on multiple platforms, and near instantly discovers your Twitter social graph, letting you have real-time chats with people to whom you are bidirectionally connected. This way, all of those with whom you can send and receive DMs can also chat with you in Joint.

Joint In Action With Friends On Left, Chat Rooms Center, Discussion Right

(Click for Full Size Image)

If your friends are using Joint, public chat rooms they have created are displayed in the left sidebar, so you can pop into any chat room and start talking with those who are there. It's a lot like Convore, but on the desktop, and designed as much for 1-1 communication as for static topic chats. In fact, the chat rooms in Joint are set up so that new users who join a room don't see previous entries. Magically, if every user leaves a chat room, it too disappears, so don't be surprised if you set up a popular room more than once.

Adding A New Comment to An Existing Chat Room In Joint

(Click for Full Size Image)

What makes Joint even more like the well-known world of instant messaging (IM) is the idea of status indicators. A green status bubble means you are signed in, while a clock shows you are idle. Once in, you can create a room with any topic, or invite any of your friends to join you. You have the option to create the room with three types - Public, Protected, or Stealth. Clearly, public rooms are open to all, protected means the creator requires a password, and stealth rooms are not displayed at all - even to friends. To get into a protected room, you must be invited, or enter the known password. Stealth rooms even feature a cool stealth bomber icon.

Before you shrug off Joint as "yet another chatroom" service, think of using this first to replace those back and forth DM sessions you've no doubt had with friends, and then think about starting real group chat with your Twitter social graph. Want to get in? Leave me a comment, and follow @imjoint on Twitter. This one's a keeper.

Yobongo: The Open Chat Room In Your Pocket (Preview)

In the four months since Yobongo first gained attention, CEO and co-founder Caleb Elston has been working to prepare his product for the visibility and scale potentially demanded by what's potentially the world's biggest tech event, SXSW, an environment which can catapult new sites into the stratosphere, or should they fall flat, have them forced to regroup. The service, currently in private beta on the iOS platform, has seen increasing activity at practically all hours, the equivalent of an open bar for discussion with members of the local community, which never closes.

In the last few weeks, I've finally found a reason to keep my iPod Touch nearby, in a home full of Android devices. The magnet-like pull is from Yobongo, whose goal is to bring people, potentially perfect strangers, who share a geographic location, together to talk about anything. The application's real-time nature, enabling true conversations between friends and others, goes beyond the world of serve and volley status updates or Q&A, putting the focus back onto the world of conversation instead of performance and counting of replies, retweets and likes. In fact, there are no points of feedback for updates - just a constant flow.


    Yobongo in Action. Note notifiers for private messages, number of people chatting.

The concept hasn't changed since October, with the idea being people in shared spaces may discover they have common interests and can engage in intriguing discussions. For the many of us who routinely bump into the same faces and avatars on every network, this could be refreshing. Yes, just like any other social situation, it's easier to talk to those you know than those you don't, but Yobongo eases that process by mixing everyone in a single space.

So each morning, after turning off the iPod's alarm, I peek at Yobongo to find Caleb talking with users in the private beta. Some folks I know, and others I don't, but I am getting to know. And it's incredibly easy to jump into the stream of consciousness. For one, your avatar displays when you open the app, so they can welcome you. Second, the app doesn't start with a blank screen, but shows all the text flowing through the river - with the newest updates below. Should you want to, you can scroll up and see how the conversation evolved, see updates from people whom you may have missed, and get caught up.

Posting to the site couldn't be easier. There are no groups to join, as with other apps, some I like a lot (including Beluga and TextPlus). There are no demands to friend folks, as you're already connected to everyone live. And once you start typing, everybody knows because the system lightly says "... is typing." If more than one person is typing, the system updates there too. So you immediately, even in a small space like the iPod Touch, get an idea for all the participants, the ongoing messages, you can get updated on private conversations and see the thread as it evolves. Not bad.


    An active Yobongo chat and a separate private message.

Caleb, previously highlighted on this site for his work with Toluu, Kallow and Kickpost, started the project with fellow Justin.TV ex-colleague David Kasper, who is responsible for engineering while Caleb handles product, the "yin and yang" of the operation as it stands now, he told me. While the company has been mentioned in the same breath as big group chat monoliths like GroupMe and others who have raised millions, Yobongo has not yet taken any funding. Lucky for them, they do have free residence at Dogpatch Labs, courtesy of Mike Hirschland and Ryan Spoon of Polaris Ventures, who would probably have the first in to a round A if Yobongo wanted to be YoFunded.

Like Quora, Facebook and other sites, Yobongo holds a few rules to help avoid abuse of the system. It's preferred that guests use real photos and use their real names. The app's short community guidelines ask to "be friendly", "be respectful" and "be authentic".

Does the world need yet another place to chat beyond the big social networks, and new places like Convore or the host of group messaging participants, including Beluga, GroupMe, MessageParty and TextPlus? It seems to me there is room for a lightweight system that doesn't feel like work, that is open to all who arrive, and leverages proximity. Whether Yobongo is the solution to an event like SXSW or not, only reaching those on iOS, remains to be seen, but I can see clear value to talking with both the friends you know, and the friends you don't yet know.

You can get in on Yobongo's private beta list by heading to http://www.yobongo.com. The service's first official intro video is below.

Convore Brings Bulletin Boards Into World of Real-Time

The new Web never runs out of great ideas for small groups of people to discuss topics with friends, share catchy images and videos and collaborate. From the earliest BBSes to public chatrooms, lifestreaming applications and today's social networking powerhouses, people are constantly searching for new communities and looking for new tools that make it easier to share - either to the general public or in private groups. Even as 2007 to 2009 saw an explosion of mass broadcasting tools letting you reach thousands of people with the same identical message, 2010 and 2011 are seeing a retrenching into more private groups, centered on similar interests, shared experiences or location - hence mobile apps like Beluga, Yobongo, GroupMe and TextPlus. On the Web, you've also seen groups play a role on Facebook, FriendFeed previously and many other sites.

For the last few months, I've been spending way too much of my time in the late evenings on a fun site so secret I never told you - not because of its dark subject matter or inappropriate content, but simply because it hadn't yet been ready to launch. Today, Convore goes live. Started by Eric Florenzano, Eric Maguire and Leah Culver, formerly of Pownce via Six Apart, the team has been building what Florenzano called "a targeted subset of FriendFeed", the once popular social networking site that rose quickly and fell in the eyes of Silicon Valley nearly as fast, being overweighted with features that may have confused the message.

Popular Topics on Convore With Messages to Read

Discussion of Windows Phone 7 on Convore

Eric told me, in a 1-1 phone interview at the beginning of the year that what Convore is interested in is groups and group-based apps, including the communication aspects of this medium. The site is designed with each topic having its own chat room, in a smaller group, for those folks who are interested in specific topics.

A User Profile on Convore With Stars, Messages Statistics

"We want each group to have its own identity," Eric said. "As Twitter has grown, it is less easy to say things we once did. With a smaller group of your friends, you can feel a lot more comfortable saying whatever the heck you want."

Like any good geek-initiated site, much of Convore's initial discussions have centered around tech, the benefits of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Internet memes. Where the product is especially fun is in sharing of rich media, as the service auto-supports image URLs and hosts them locally. With some momentum, a silly image share can lead to a real-time barrage of sharing from friends that is hard to duplicate anywhere else. You can also star items to reward posters or save the updates for later.

Lest the overlap with FriendFeed be too clear, Convore is funded by Y! Combinator, which includes Paul Buchheit, cofounder of FriendFeed, and a former Facebooker. It's also worth noting the site does not aggregate any external content, but only hosts new discussions. If you start engaging with other users of the site, a helpful "bell" that signals new updates in threads where you are active can keep you as addicted as Pavlov's dog. I've made hundreds of updates there and no doubt will be putting more time into one of my favorite sites. Check it out at http://www.convore.com.

Beluga's Pre-SXSW Buzz Builds A Month Into App's Life

With services such as Twitter and Foursquare gaining incredible boosts through high visibility at the yearly South by Southwest event (SXSW), it has become something of a pastime to predict which service will be the breakthrough this year, if any. If early response to Beluga is any indication, the application, in addition to other candidates, such as Yobongo, is in the driver's seat to take that role in 2011. Only a month after the application debuted, the group texting service has gained high-profile mentions in publications as varied as Fortune and TechCrunch, and I can see new contacts joining the service every day - as each new connection from my address book notifies me from within the service.

As debated on Quora, it's widely assumed the best candidates for a boost from SXSW would be those useful at the event itself, be it for discovering top parties, debating keynotes and panels, and enabling people to communicate in the sometimes frenetic venue with spotty wireless support. This leads us to Beluga and Yobongo - the first enabling free texting between friends with intelligent linkage to location data and photos support, and the second offering location-based chat with complete strangers. But Yobongo doesn't have multi-platform support yet (including Android), and Beluga is already seeing good cross-platform engagement from early adopters, former Googlers, and is gaining awareness in the mainstream, especially after having been featured in the Android Market this week by Google - goosing the app's download numbers significantly.


   Updates from Beluga With Photos and GeoLocation

The group chat field is one that is becoming increasingly crowded, with TextPlus, GroupMe and now Beluga being the best-known players. But Beluga, without the 10 million in funding gained by GroupMe, already has an extremely smooth application that integrates well with both mobile and Web-based activity, supports multiple mobile OSes and is very lightweight. As I've seen new "pods" started within my groups of friends, for the casual to the more business-oriented, it's obvious that a simple and fast way to exchange messages in groups, independent of the larger networks, like Twitter and Facebook, is much desired.


   Tony Hung and Siobhan Quinn Rave About Beluga In the App(Note Also the Geographical Reach of this Pod)

Guessing where the application could go in the future would be especially interesting as well. Recall how Brizzly Picnics had both private and public options, letting you publish question and answer chats to the Web for all to see? Today, all Beluga Pods are private to only the participants. There could come a real opportunity to make select Pods public, or even to established tiered roles for such Pods, so you could have read-only participants and moderators for public events, such as SXSW and others.



Foursquare's Dennis Crowley on Beluga's Growth Beyond the Mainstream

If it wasn't enough to just speculate about how the app could perform on the public stage, I was backed by Siobhan Quinn, product manger at Foursquare, who said in one of our Beluga Pods that "Beluga is going to blow up SXSW." Activity in individual pods is jumping, users are joining and feedback so far has been very good. It's been an eventful month for the service already, even over a usually-quiet Holiday break, but the next few months could be very loud indeed.


New Friends Are Joining Beluga All the Time

If you're not already using Beluga, go check it out at http://belugapods.com. Want to add me to a pod? Just use my email address and I'll join.

Ex-Googlers Launch Beluga for Mobile Group Chat

Simple social apps, from photo sharing to intimate networks, to group texting services are gaining in momentum with the success of TextPlus, GroupMe, Path, Instagram and others. A new entrant to the scene is a company called Beluga, not to be confused with the Fail Whale, headed up by a small team of 3 ex-Googlers who hold pedigrees from Google AdSense, Google AdWords and Gmail. The slick product has dedicated applications for both Android and iPhone platforms, and chat archives are accessible through the company's Web site as well.

Diving into the trend of more intimate social networking, where you can share with a small group of people instead of broadcasting to an unfiltered list of friends on Facebook and Twitter, Beluga asks you to create "Pods", like groups, of people, and you can send text messages, complete with photos and embedded emoticons, to those in the Pod. The service helpfully taps into your phone Address Book so you don't have to remember everybody's number, and it lets you connect with Facebook to find friends who may already be in Beluga as well.

   Beluga Pods and Conversations, With Photos

As one tech friend suggested (within Beluga), the service is actually a lot like Brizzly's Picnics feature, but mobile. I quickly found myself sharing photos of my kids to both my wife and my mom within the app, and setting up separate lists for Geeks or other contacts.



   Beluga On the Android Market and One Photo In Line

Behind the app are a trio of former Google employees, including Ben Davenport, Co-founder and CEO, who sports Google AdSense on his resume, Lucy Zhang, Co-founder and President, who helped design AdWords, News and Docs while at Google, and Jonathan Perlow, also a co-founder, and CTO, who was a senior staff engineer at Google, with responsibility as the tech lead of the Gmail front-end team. He also lists Gmail Chat and Mail Goggles among his successes.

The Web View of Beluga Pods In Action

Beluga's approach asks you to "Start a Conversation". Add a person by name, email or phone number, and keep adding until you have the right folks. Then you can start sharing. On Android, the app leverages your existing photo gallery or prompts you to take new photos if you like.

For recipients who are not yet Beluga members, texts come from a 703 area code number, and include texts from both the initiator of the conversation and all respondents. If you have Beluga installed, new updates can come as notifications within the app, and don't live in your central messages folder.

textPlus has forged the way in this market with innovative pieces, including Communities, and photos, both items Beluga has from day one. You can find Beluga on the iTunes store or in the Android Market. If we're already connected on Facebook, you'll find me in your Beluga as well.

As for the name? No fail whales yet that I can see. So that can't be the reason.

Yobongo App Encourages You to Chat With Local Strangers

Before the advent of personalized home pages, blogs, and social networks connected to our real identities, many of us participated in anonymous chat rooms, where we tried to connect with strangers with similar interests. These chat rooms were filled with intrigue of finding new conversations and insight from people we might never meet in real life. Some were about hobbies or careers, and many more were built with the goal of hooking up, but others were about location. Today, with our smartphones having the option to determine our location, and with virtually all of them having pervasive access to the Internet, there lies an opportunity to recreate the chat room experience on the mobile, with strangers, tied together by our GPS coordinates. An old friend to louisgray.com readers, Caleb Elston, has announced he is leaving a comfortable job at Justin.tv and striking it out on his own to spread the word about this new experience - and it's called Yobongo.

Caleb first crossed our radar more than two and a half years ago with the launch of his shared OPML site, Toluu. At the end of 2008, Elston started a gift recommendation site, called Kallow, and earlier this year, he launched a Techmeme-like site for top news, called Kickpost. But unlike those three projects, Yobongo is going to get his full attention - as he believes it "is going to be a big thing."


   Starting a Yobongo Account, Alerting Local Friends

I spoke at length with Caleb Thursday night, before his announcement, to learn why Yobongo has got him changing his life path, and found not just what inspired its start, but also, details about how the product has been in open testing in Canada for several months.

The idea came about when Caleb was in a crowded movie theater. In advance of a showing, people were "fooling around" on their cell phones. As he recalls, people called out funny lines on the previews and microconversations started happening. As he thought about it, he realized there lay an opportunity to connect everyone in the theater, leveraging smartphones' location capabilities and introducing real-time chat for those connected. But existing solutions were almost exclusively explicit or sexually-based, and there remained an opportunity for a non-adult option, to connect complete strangers for whom location was the single link.


   An Active Yobonbo Chat Room

"We thought there might be a possibility you could communicate with people you didn't yet know but shared a location, while using your real identity," Caleb said. "It has to be instant, with no rooms to join, all one one screen."

The algorithm behind the product starts with a basic premise of the target number of people who are active in a single room. The current target of 20 people feels full to users, and there are several dozen active Yobongo sessions, with 2-3 of them in Toronto. Why hasn't Yobongo yet come to the US? Caleb says the company doesn't yet want to launch in full in the country until the mechanics of being truly hyperlocal are solved.

"The big thing is that we believe chatrooms will live on in mobile phones, just as they lived in the late '90's," Caleb said. "The problem then was the bad actors were so motivated, and they had the technical ability to circumvent banning mechanisms, making regular people uncomfortable. But in the earliest days, it showed promise of connecting people."

With Yobongo, identity is tied to a unique phone. If a bad actor is banned, you would essentially have to buy a new phone. Also, in the last 20 years, the culture and technology of the Internet has evolved to make revealing one's true identity more comfortable and accepted.

"Authentic communication can happen between people you do not know," Caleb argued. "For the personal device you have with you all the time, connecting to people is an exciting mechanism. There are more mobile connected devices next year than PC devices."

The application is initially targeting iPhone users, but with time, one should suspect the app to hit more screens and more systems. As Caleb told me, it's "iPhone only right now - but that's not the end game".

Nurph Brings Chat Conversations from Site to Site

The concept of browsing the Web with friends is an often-discussed target rarely implemented well - usually requiring heavy browser plugins and Web meeting software or a centralized Web site. We saw Browzmi in 2008, an interesting service that didn't gain tremendous traction, but was a good proofpoint and testing ground. Today, we have a new entrant, Nurph, which lets you take the conversation with friends and move it around, complete with a new URL shortener to drive engagement from network to network. The service is now open in public beta.

Starting with Nurph (at http://nur.ph) is very simple. Go to their Web site and drop in a URL that you want to discuss. That could be anything from CNN or Apple's iPad page to any article or photo stream you find online. The customized URL (extended from nur.ph) delivers a chat window in the bottom right corner of the site, with your Nurph avatar.

A conversation on Nurph about our FTC Disclosure Icons

If more than one friend is on the URL, their avatar is displayed, just like many other chat rooms. You can chat in the floating window - entering an @username to refer to the individual, or a URL to take the conversation somewhere else with its own Nurph.

A Nurph Conversation on Apple's iPad Site

A Nurph Chat On a Slow Day for CNN

In our testing of it, switching URLs was seamless. Clicking a shared link would whisk you away from the existing chatroom and your friends would need to follow you along to keep the conversation going. This was a small hassle in terms of waiting for them to catch up, but there's no sense in keeping a discussion in one place and people in another.

In a Nurph chat I had with some of the company's first users, including Neil, one of the the cofounders, we talked about the popular FTC disclosure icons from this blog in December, debated a slow news day at CNN and chatted about whether we had purchased iPads yet. Practically the only site where we ran into trouble with the Nurph window was when playing QuickTime videos, but for static pages, the Nurph just became part of the experience. Should be a fun way to get family and friends on a single page, breaking chat out of the social networks and into everywhere else.

Check out Nurph at http://nur.ph.